Identity is the New Perimeter: Why Your IdP Isn’t Enough

In a cloud-first world, identity is one of the most critical layers of security. While organizations are making progress using IdPs, major identity protection gaps remain.

The rise of Identity Providers (IdPs) like Okta, Microsoft Entra ID and Google Cloud Identity has helped organizations centralize and strengthen human identity authentication. Strategic practices like multi-factor authentication (MFA), single sign-on (SSO) and policy enforcement are making IdPs a cornerstone of workforce access control.

According to the Tenable Cloud Security Risk Report 2025, 83% of organizations using Amazon Web Services (AWS) have configured at least one IdP — showing a move to greater maturity in identity practices. An IdP focuses on authentication and authorization – verifying identities and enforcing who can access what systems and under what conditions.

While the use of IdPs is a good step, organizations are still exposed to toxic identity risks that such tools don’t sufficiently cover. IdPs offer limited visibility into how identities behave within — and across — cloud environments, particularly when it comes to advanced identity threats like privilege escalation and lateral movement. Relying solely on an IdP creates critical blind spots. Here’s what you need to know — and how Tenable Cloud Security closes these identity security gaps.

The gaps your IdP doesn’t cover

1. Excessive permissions

The challenge: Developers often grant broad permissions to IAM roles or service accounts — such as s3:*, iam:*, ec2:*. These defaults are rarely audited or reduced later.

Why it’s dangerous: A compromise of one overly-permissioned identity can enable an attacker to gain excessive access — potentially escalating into full environmental takeover.

How Tenable Cloud Security can help:

• Integrates cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM) to map actual, effective permissions across your environment.
• Automatically identifies over-permissioned and inactive identities
• Recommends least-privilege policies based on real-world usage — not guesswork.
• Enables Just in Time (JIT) access to reduce standing permissions to cloud resources and SaaS applications and improve auditability.
• Based on real-world usage.

2. Dormant and stale credentials

The challenge: Service accounts and identity and access management (IAM) roles often persist long after their purpose ends. They remain active, unused — and unmonitored.

Why it’s dangerous: Attackers love dormant credentials. They’re rarely rotated, never expire and can silently unlock production environments.

How Tenable Cloud Security can help:

• Continuously audits identity usage across Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure  and Oracle Cloud.
• Flags and allows deactivation of unused identities based on 30, 60 or 90+ days of inactivity.
• Provides real-time visibility for eliminating these silent attack paths before attackers find them.

3. Misconfigured trust policies

The challenge: IAM trust policies define who can assume what roles. But, too often, they're broadly written: "Allow any principal in this account."

Why it’s dangerous: These misconfigurations can enable privilege escalation, lateral movement or role hijacking — especially in cross-account scenarios.

How Tenable Cloud Security can help:

• Parses IAM trust policies and flags overly permissive configurations.
• Correlates identity trust with associated network exposure to show real attack paths, not just theoretical misconfigurations.
• Helps your team lock down role assumptions before they’re exploited.

Securing the full identity fabric with Tenable Cloud Security

While IdPs play a vital role in access control, they only cover one part of your identity landscape. Tenable Cloud Security delivers deep, cloud-native identity security that complements — and goes far beyond — your IdP, including:

Continuous discovery and risk mapping:

• Auto-discovers all human and non-human identities across your multicloud environments.
• Maps effective permissions, trust relationships and access blast radius.
• Unifies visibility across AWS, Azure, GCP and Oracle Cloud.

Prioritized risk context

• Correlates infrastructure, identities, vulnerabilities, network, data and AI resources across multi-cloud and, with the Tenable One Exposure Management Platform, hybrid environments
• Surfaces the highest-priority risks.
• Doesn’t just show you what’s wrong — shows the context for why it matters and how to fix it fast.

Least privilege with CIEM – and JIT access

• Enforces least privilege at scale with automated, CIEM-driven policy recommendations.
• Make least privilege more granular with timebound, JIT access.
• Integrates IAM hygiene into DevSecOps workflows to prevent permissions drift over time.

Why understanding identity security complexity in the cloud matters for CISOs

IdPs are necessary — but not sufficient. Attackers are chaining identity misconfigurations with network exposure and unpatched CVEs to move laterally within an organization. Your IdP may be helping guard against initial access but a serious security battle is being fought deep inside your cloud environment — between workloads, data pipelines and service identities.

With Tenable Cloud Security and Tenable One you can see and secure the full identity picture and tie it all into your broader cloud exposure management strategy.

➡️ Download the Tenable Cloud Security Risk Report 2025

➡️ View our on-demand research webinar

➡️ Read the previous blog in this series: The Toxic Cloud Trilogy: Why Your Workloads Are a Ticking Time Bomb

Don't stop at securing logins. Secure every identity. With Tenable Cloud Security, identity becomes your strongest control — not your weakest link.